what’s in an e-mail signature?

We answered the question of mailing addresses in Wendy’s post what’s in an address? but most of us communicate by e-mail so we often get asked a more urgent question:

How should I format my e-mail signature? What information should I include?

In August 2007 Mitch Wagner wrote a great article What Does Your E-Mail Signature Say About You? where he humorously explores who uses signatures, how long they should be and why.

“The longer your e-mail signature, the lower down the food chain you are.“

Read the rest of Wagner’s short article for a good overview of signature structure, length and how to end an e-mail without offending people.

Wagner touches on the influence of marketing over e-mail signatures and references Make Your E-Mail Signature File Work for You! Alexandria Brown provides some good tips and a sig file checklist but marketing styles and trends move quickly. And unless you’re lucky enough to have a good understanding of what works and why, any kind of marketing can be daunting for start-ups. It’s good to start with an understanding of your objective and then apply this to your e-mail signature.

For Business Ready, one of our objectives is to share our knowledge with as many growing companies as possible. We’ve chosen to include a feed from our blog for our e-mail signatures (we use Feedburner). For example, here’s my current signature:

–
Tanya Burek > tanya (a) businessready.ca
Business Ready Solutions Inc. >> businessready.ca

By using a hosted graphic, we can ensure that everyone at Business Ready is using the same signature so our message is always consistent. It also makes it easier to communicate our promotions and company news to our customers, but to help support our support team as well.

If your objective is to always be available for communication, a useful item to include in your your e-mail address may be your Skype status (several buttons and widgets available from Skype’s Share > Gear & Gadgets section).

If you’re using Gmail it can be a bit tricky to include graphics in your signatures. Some people are willing to suffer with a clunky workaround but we’re hoping for something better in our Googley future.

Regardless of what you decide to include in your e-mail signature, try to keep it consistent. Many start-ups tend to experiment with logos and branding. If you keep your e-mail signature consistent with your company’s message, you’ll improve your chances of making a lasting impression.